Incorporation policies in diversifying rural localities in Italy: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Rural areas in Italy are not entirely new to international immigration, but they recently experienced a huge diversification of flows, including labour and amenity migrants and, due to relocation strategies, asylum-seekers and refugees. In places with limited resources and experience of diversity, such processes can originate new challenges, but also new opportunities. Therefore, this work investigates incorporation policies of Italian rural municipalities with quantitative and qualitative methods. First, k-medians clustering is used to classify rural municipalities according to immigration patterns and to better understand their immigrant policy activism. Second, semi-structured stakeholders' interviews are performed to explore actual practices of active rural municipalities. Results show how rural policymakers can develop alternative and innovative strategies to deal with incorporation, but these have different outcomes according to local opportunity structures and contexts of immigration.